FEEDBACK – WHAT FEEDBACK?

This chapter starts with an optimistic assumption – that you will get some kind of feedback after an interview. In fact too often candidates don’t get objective and helpful feedback at any stage in the interview process – whether the process had a positive result or not.

Job searchers need to get to grasp an important reality: recruiters and interviewers are not officially in the advice business. Thankfully we can all point to noble exceptions to the rule – individuals who have provided us with encouragement as well as valuable tips – but the rule still holds. A decision maker is interested in filling a role, not counselling you through the process of job change.

HOW MUCH FEEDBACK SHOULD YOU EXPECT?

You have no automatic right to feedback. An employer is entitled to make a decision – there is no legal requirement even to inform candidates that they have been rejected. Believing that feedback after an interview is something you are ‘owed’ is as misguided as complaining about the process or challenging the result. These behaviours simply put you into the opposition camp.

You should ask for feedback (but only if you know how to interpret it, build on it, and not be confused by it, which is why this chapter exists); however, you should not expect to receive it as a right or as a standard stage in the recruitment process.

A vast amount of information masquerades as feedback. You will be told all kinds of things about what an interviewer likes or dislikes. Some of this is quite simply a matter of interviewer prejudice (brown shoes in the city, wearing scent, taking gap years ...), some of it strong opinion (for example, about how many pages your CV should contain, or whether you should mention your interests outside work). There are probably as many opinions out there as interviewing styles.

IS IT WORTH ASKING FOR FEEDBACK?

I have been tempted in public to give a definitive ‘no’ to this question, and the jury is still out. So much feedback is either bland or misleading, and often sends candidates on a wild goose chase.

Be clear – sometimes there are hard and fast reasons why you don’t get a job (you might lack management experience or language skills, for example), but at the final selection stage such clear-cut reasons are unusual. It is rare that an interviewer gives you a useful breakdown of the strengths and weaknesses of your performance; more frequently you hear something bland but vaguely troubling.

For example, an interviewer says ‘your examples were a little long’. So you adjust your strategy for all future interviews, chopping out good information and not telling the full story. Perhaps the interview feedback was ‘some of your evidence wasn’t recent enough’, so you start to drop good evidence. You might hear ‘you don’t have enough leadership experience’, and you believe you’re not a leader. Feedback which is explicitly about your personality knocks your confidence even more.

A great deal of feedback is code for ‘we chose someone else, get over it’ or even ‘we’re not sure, so don’t ask’. Feedback easily slides into rejection: you don’t feel good about it, and you haven’t learned anything either. The danger is that next you adjust your behaviours, hoping for a different result. This is not actually a strategy, just a hope that the dice will fall differently next time.

Don’t tinker with your interview approach unless you get genuine feedback you can do something about. This is not, by the way, a free ride for those who don’t feel there is any room for improvement in their interview skills; that’s the deafness of egotism talking – we all need to learn and adapt.

THE REAL DEAL

What does good feedback look like? It is a set of responses that prompts you to improve the way you do things. Valid feedback will tell you how your practised performance actually works – there’s a difference between encouragement from a kindly driving instructor and cold facts from your examiner.

Here are some examples of critical feedback that some of my clients have been given that helped them to quickly get to a winning interview performance:

• Speaking too much so that the interviewer couldn’t hear the right evidence or get all the questions in.
• Appearing too reserved and not sounding excited by the role.
• Being inappropriately assertive and ‘in your face’.
• Underplaying strengths and achievements.
• Failing to translate experience into language the interviewer got excited by.
• Not covering all the bases in terms of the interviewer’s short list.
• Being floored by personal or quirky questions.
• Failing to read the room and establish some kind of relationship with everyone present.
• Failure to demonstrate an understanding of the needs and problems which cause the job to exist.
• Not making sense of your career to date.
• Failing to get primary messages across.

WHY BOTHER WITH FEEDBACK AT ALL?

Some people are gifted at seeing themselves the way others see them, some less so. Most of us have blind spots – there are things you do well that you don’t see (so can’t build on them) and things you do badly that you are blind to (and therefore can’t deal with them). Interestingly, it takes only a small amount of live performance feedback to address these issues. The mistake candidates make is to ask employers to do this.

You only get feedback, in reality and on a good day, on about 10 per cent of your performance. Therefore even assuming every employer is insightful and generous enough to deliver, it could still take 10 or more interviews to get anything like the complete picture. Far more effective and economical, surely, to get near-complete feedback on one occasion which is unconnected to a real job decision.

Some things you can address through practice interviews. Perhaps you use the same expression too much. You might ‘um’ and ‘er’, or take too long to think of an answer (unprepared it can take people 20–30 seconds to come up with a reasonable answer to a high level question). You might speak too quietly or say things in an undertone at the end of an answer. You might lose track of the question. All this is for the practice zone. Don’t use a real job interview to discover the basics, because it’s a wasted opportunity.

Feedback can sometimes show you that you did the wrong kind of research, or misunderstood what the organisation was looking for – all good learning points. However, most times you can be a good judge of how well prepared you were – score yourself out of 10 on your preparation for every interview, and then work out what you need to do to improve that score by one point. You can’t go from 2 out of 10 to full marks overnight, but you would be surprised how easily a quick fix will get you to something more like 7 out of 10. Understand the difference between perfect and ‘good enough’.

Of the hundreds of individuals I have coached through job interviews, even the most confident has improved in both effectiveness and confidence just by answering real, penetrating questions in a rehearsal interview. It needs to be demanding, it needs to feel real, and it needs to be conducted by someone who has experience of putting real questions to real candidates. You can even write the questions for them, but it is vital that you answer them with the same voice and the same seriousness that you would do ‘live’. If the answer is too long, too woolly, or doesn’t come out right, do it again. Don’t accept bland encouragement – if the answer was good, find out why. Ask for your evidence to be tested. Invite tough questions on the topics you don’t want to talk about. Very little in an interview should be improvised, but what you say should sound lively and spontaneous.

THE BEST WAY TO ASK FOR FEEDBACK

Organisations, and the interviewers representing them, do not like anything which sounds like a challenge to a hiring decision. So any question that sounds like ‘Why wasn’t I selected?’ is a complete no-go. Employers are worried about litigation, so will always answer a challenge with some variant of this standard paragraph: We were delighted to meet you at interview. There was a very strong field of applicants and we were able to offer the role to someone who more closely met our requirements. What do you learn from that? Nothing. It does not mean that you didn’t meet the selection criteria or that you had some kind of gap in your evidence. It simply tells you that someone else got the job.

We have already agreed that interview feedback is a bonus, not a right. So, if you get it, listen carefully, take notes, and then reflect on what you have heard. However, do ask the right question. The question ‘What did I do wrong?’ or ‘What were my weaknesses at interview?’ still sound to an employer like ‘Why didn’t you give me the job?’ A far better approach is ‘I enjoyed the interview and I’m delighted you found the right candidate. It would really help me in future interviews if you could give me one or two tips about my interview performance. What did I do well? What could I have done better?’ Starting with a positive makes it easier for the interviewer, and may even boost your confidence. You are also getting the interviewer to think about actual behaviours and performance – what you actually did, not what they liked or disliked about you. Focusing on future interviews means that your question has nothing to do with this particular role.

SECOND INTERVIEW

You may get feedback between a first and second interview – ‘We enjoyed meeting you and we’d like to continue the conversation.’ Any invitation to a second interview is always an opportunity to find out what has worked so far. A question along the lines of ‘I’d be interested to know what aspects of my experience have taken me to the next stage’ is always helpful, quickly followed by ‘It would help my preparation to know where you have any concerns or where I should supply more details.’

FEEDBACK VS. DATA

When you are thinking over feedback you have received, do learn to distinguish between facts and ‘spin’. We’ve already discussed the difference between feedback which is specific (this job, this organisation) and generic (all job applications, all future interviews).

Do remember that interviewers, particularly those working for intermediaries (recruitment agencies) often hold strong opinions about things like CV format, interview dress code, interview style, questions you should always or never ask, and so on. Some of this is useful, some of it is entirely context-driven. The rule here is simple – if you get similar feedback from several sources (for example, ‘you are not communicating your skills in the right language for our sector’), that’s tangible feedback you can work with.

Finally, and please print this in large letters and stick it inside the front cover of your job application file:

REJECTION IS NOT FEEDBACK

Rejection is just rejection, and a great deal of feedback is just noise. Unless, that is, it’s consistent and repeated (Chapter 19 shows you the dangers of interpreting your misses on the Job Application Dartboard, and Chapter 6 offers warnings about attending interviews ‘just for practice’).

There are many, many reasons why you might not get short listed for a role, and (particularly if this happens before the job interview stage) most reasons are much more about the arbitrariness of the process than they are about your application. It’s tempting to put yourself centre stage, but believe me, most reasons for rejection are not about you.

So don’t feel you always need to rewrite your CV, learn new interview answers, or even give up, because you are experiencing a feeling, not getting feedback. In fact, if you get a ‘no’, don’t start adjusting your CV or trashing your interview skills. Go and do something entirely different which is not related to job seeking – cycle up a hill, go to a movie, go shopping – do whatever you normally do to feel good about life, and review your results later when you have a clearer, cooler mind.